What’s more, in a homage to the ‘sport of kings’ imported into France by the Brits, Napoléon had also commissioned an addition to the park – Longchamp racecourse, which, although Bertie didn’t yet know it, was to provide him with plenty of thrills in years to come.
As the procession crossed the Seine, Napoléon must have regretted that he hadn’t managed to get the royal party to the Château de Saint-Cloud before dark. It was a jewel of French architecture, a mainly classical structure built by Louis XIV’s brother the Duc d’Orléans and enlarged still further by Louis XVI as a gift for his bride Marie-Antoinette. The château overlooked the river and the distant city from its vast, terraced park, and had been chosen by both Napoléon I and Napoléon III as the venue for their investitures. It was the ultimate French status symbol, and now Victoria, Albert, Vicky and Bertie were getting only a partial view.
Inside the château, the reception that Napoléon had prepared was grand and intimate at the same time. We can get an idea of the atmosphere from a painting by one of his favourite artists, Charles Müller.
The picture, based on sketches that Müller made on the night, shows the reception hall crowded with finely dressed courtiers, the chicest gathering that France could muster. These were the imperial couple’s friends, allies and confidants, including Napoléon’s cousin and former fiancée, Mathilde, who was living openly with her aristocratic Dutch lover.
Decorating the staircase, like so many potted plants, Müller depicts a rank of soldiers in plumed gold helmets that reflect the light from the weighty chandeliers. And at the heart of this glowing scene are its royal and imperial stars. Most visible, given that he had commissioned the painting, is Napoléon, unrealistically slim and upright in a blue military frock coat and tight red trousers, his moustache as stiff as the hands of a clock face stuck at quarter to three. Beside him, elegant in a high-collared dress, Eugénie is looking kindly at a slightly dowdy Victoria, who is the only adult woman in the room wearing a bonnet, a sort of tight white nightcap. The Queen seems to be bowing to the French couple (Müller was French, after all), as if grateful for being invited into such a smart home. Albert, resplendent in a scarlet tunic, is standing to one side, perhaps so that his tall stature won’t put Napoléon in the shade. With one hand on his sabre, Albert is looking thoughtful, as if asking himself, ‘Is that Frenchie chatting up my wife?’
Müller has also taken great care over the portraits of Princess Vicky – a miniature of her mother, right down to the bonnet – and Bertie, who are standing between their parents. The young Prince is wearing a smart white shirt and dark jacket, his fair hair slicked down as though his mother had just forced him to comb it. Strangely, Bertie is the only person in the picture looking at the painter. It is as if a realization is dawning on him. He is in the centre of this scene, surely the most glamorous event that night in the whole of the western world,8 apparently thinking: Amongst all these royal and imperial adults and these incredibly chic courtiers, that artist is drawing me. Mich. Moi. Am I really that important? Well, now you mention it . . .
VI
Over the next few days, Bertie had to rise to the challenge of constant attention, from the critical eyes of the public as he and his family were displayed around town, and the closer scrutiny of his parents, who would have been watching him keenly for any sign that it had been a bad idea to invite him along. Until they received proof to the contrary, Bertie was still a backward boy in need of constant bullying by his moral tutors. Here in France, he was off the leash and needed careful monitoring.
Some of the official events must have been hard going for a teenaged boy known for his lack of concentration – such as three hours trooping around the Exposition’s art show featuring 5,000 works by 2,000 artists from 28 countries (although half of the art was French, of course). The show excited people like the notorious drug-taking poet Baudelaire, who wrote that ‘the exhibition of English painters is . . . worthy of a long and patient study’. It sounds like the kind of exhibition that would bore a thirteen-year-old to tears.
Even so, there was one canvas that would almost certainly have caught Bertie’s attention: German painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s group portrait of Empress Eugénie and her ladies-in-waiting. To the modern eye, the pale, languorous women with their flat centre partings, drooping ringlets and enormously bouffant dresses look like a collection of human cushions, but to Bertie (and indeed everyone but the hardest-nosed Parisian revolutionary), the eight women posing in a rather damp-looking woodland clearing would have been a vision of almost divine loveliness, the perfect pallor of their skin and their shimmering gowns giving them an air of infinite self-assurance. And let’s not forget those shoulders – each dress, including that of the Empress, is cut to leave the women naked from the biceps upwards, with their necklines hanging tantalizingly loose just above the cleavage. If any of them had crossed her arms, her dress would simply have fallen off.
The erotic undertone of the picture was like an advert for imperialism. A few decades earlier, the superior attitude of these aristocratic women would have got them dispatched to the guillotine, but now they shamelessly display their finery, mutely implying, ‘Stick with Napoléon III and you too could have some of this.’ In Bertie’s case, a few years later the message would come literally true.
The tour of the art exhibition was followed by lunch, which apparently caused some confusion in Paris. The meal was announced in the official programme of the state visit using the English word, and ‘lunch’ was something that few French people had ever heard of. One journalist reported overhearing a Parisian man saying it must have been a misprint for ‘punch’ – the English royals were probably going to be tasting rum cocktails.
Bertie would have enjoyed his visit to the Palais de l’Industrie a lot more, because here was an exhibition featuring plenty of noise, steam and excitement. Visitors to the 1855 Expo could see brand-new or recent inventions like the lawn mower, the washing machine (not that any members of the royal family would be using either of those personally), the saxophone, Samuel Colt’s six-shooter pistol, telegraph machines, electric clocks, a coffee machine capable of producing 2,000 cups per hour, a cement rowing boat, the world’s biggest-ever mirror (5.37 metres high and 3.36 wide), and all kinds of machines that sliced, crushed, harvested, heated, cooled or transported any industrial or agricultural product you could think of. One of the most popular attractions was the stand giving away free samples of freshly roasted tobacco.
Some of the more stately occasions were just as eventful. On Thursday, 23 August, the British royals were guests of honour at a ball given by the city of Paris at the Hôtel de Ville. Amongst the other guests were some visiting sheiks, one of whom bowed before Victoria and, before anyone could stop him, lifted the Queen’s dress and kissed her ankle, proclaiming, with an acute sense of English history, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’9 It was a joke that could have got him skewered by Prince Albert for fondling the royal personage if Victoria had not reacted with a restrained laugh. Despite her prudish image, the Queen was apparently getting into the Parisian swing of things.
The day after the ankle-kissing incident, 24 August, is the one that most of Bertie’s biographers10 linger on. After a dusk review of 45,000 troops performing manoeuvres on the Champ-de-Mars (where the Eiffel Tower would later be built), Victoria insisted on taking Bertie to the Invalides to see the tomb of Napoléon Bonaparte. It was an impromptu visit, so when the small party arrived at what is, even today, a museum set around a residential home for injured soldiers, the reception committee was a modest but remarkable one – a group of torch-bearing veterans, including some old-timers who had fought alongside Bonaparte himself.
It was a dark, windy night, and the torches were flickering wildly as the visitors were led into the chapel by the limping veterans. The former Emperor’s body was lying in state in the small Chapelle de Saint-Jérôme while his immense mausoleum was being built beneath the great dome.11 The coffin was draped in a violet pa
ll embroidered with honey bees – the Bonaparte emblem. As Victoria entered the shadowy, chilled chapel with Napoléon III and the old soldiers, she was overcome with the solemnity of the occasion, as she freely admitted in her diary:
There I stood, at the arm of Napoléon III, his nephew, before the coffin of England’s bitterest foe; I, the granddaughter of that King who hated him most, and who most vigorously opposed him, and this very nephew, who bears his name, being my nearest and dearest ally! . . . Strange and wonderful indeed, it seems, as if in this tribute of respect to a dead and departed foe, old enmities and rivalries were wiped out, and the seal of Heaven placed upon that bond of unity, which is now happily established between two great and powerful nations!
Victoria must have guessed that this declaration of a divinely approved friendship between Britain and France would not have gone down well with politicians back home, despite the temporary Anglo-French alliance over Crimea, but she decided to seal the moment for history. Turning to Bertie, the heir to her throne and to this new friendship, she ordered him to kneel before Bonaparte. The young Prince, dressed in full highland costume, including the sporran (or ‘hairy bag’ as André Castelot calls it in his account of the visit) obeyed, and as he did so, a lightning storm erupted outside, sending thunder crashing against the chapel walls. Some of the veterans interpreted this as a supernatural sign and began to weep.
To Bertie’s young mind, it must have come as fresh confirmation that he was at the very heart of events. And in a very real way, this was the ceremony that formalized his lifelong bond with France. With a crack of cannon-like thunder, the spirit of Bonaparte himself was telling the boy: ‘Bienvenu chez nous.’
The following day, 25 August, saw Bertie yet again being committed to canvas. Joseph-Louis-Hippolyte Bellangé’s painting Royal Visit to Napoleon III: meet of the Imperial Hunt at the Chateau de la Muette, in the forest of St Germain, 25 August 185512 shows the French and British first families enjoying a social gathering that was the complete opposite of the hunts Bertie had known until then, which were usually windblown slogs across the bleak Scottish moors.
In Bellangé’s picture, a large pack of hounds is being held in formation by huntsmen in green-and-gold coats and red breeches, while the ever-present crowds of chic onlookers strain to get a look at the VIPs and are kept away by mounted guards.
The royal and imperial party stands in front of the château, with Albert and Napoléon in decidedly non-rustic frock coats and top hats, and Victoria in bright pink, looking uncharacteristically elegant. Actually, she looks exactly like the French dames watching from the château, so either the Queen had wholeheartedly embraced la vie parisienne or Bellangé was taking liberties with the truth. In fact the painting is generally more diplomatic than realistic, because Napoléon and Victoria are made to look as tall as Albert. Bertie, meanwhile, in long trousers and highland cap, is glancing up towards his father as if to say: ‘These people are here to look at moi aussi, aren’t they?’ He was growing in stature every day.
The royal visit reached its culmination that same night when Eugénie and Napoléon hosted an immense ball at Versailles. Even by the lavish standards of the time, it was a spectacular event. One French observer, the photographer Caron de Lalande, wrote that the soirée ‘would seem like an impossible fairy tale if the lucky witnesses of these wonders were not here to testify that they really saw and touched these unimaginable “sumptuosities”, that they really smelled all the flowers reflected by floods of light in the infinite gallery of mirrors’.
Napoléon III was, like Albert, a champion of new technology, and Louis XIV’s palace had been fitted with the latest gas lighting, and plenty of it. The state rooms were lit as if it were daytime, a magical experience for people used to shadowy candlelight. There were flowers and plants everywhere, in vases along the walls and hanging from the ceilings like coloured chandeliers. The guests were as luminous as the décor – a sea of silk, white breeches, bare shoulders and moustache wax. More than 1,000 privileged partygoers had been invited to dance to four orchestras, one of which was directed by the Austrian maestro of the waltz, Johann Strauss himself.
The pregnant Eugénie made a rare public appearance, coming out to receive the English guests as they arrived in their carriage from Saint-Cloud. The Empress met them at the top of a staircase, which, perhaps unbeknownst to Victoria, was a protocol victory and proof of Eugénie’s status – making the Queen walk up to greet her.13
Victoria proudly noted in her diary that ‘there had not been a ball at Versailles since the time of Louis XVI’. This, too, was an important step for Eugénie, who had now elevated herself to the status of Marie-Antoinette.
The night’s festivities opened with a waltz, enjoyed by all the royals including Bertie, who joined in with the adults and acquitted himself admirably. The dancing was followed by dinner in the Opéra Royal, Louis XIV’s private theatre within his palace.
There are photographs of this soirée, as there are of most of the events of Victoria’s state visit, but inevitably they are grey and static. Again, we are lucky enough to have a painting that captures all the glamour, colour and movement of the occasion. Eugène Lami’s Supper at Versailles in Honour of the Queen of England, 25 August 1855 depicts a scene that is less like a state banquet (elbows tucked in, be careful not to splash your soup over the Belgian Ambassador) than a massive, almost riotous, wedding reception. Instead of formal exchanges about the Crimean War and the trade deficit against a background of the polite clink of silver on porcelain, there must have been a roar of conversation and laughter.
The imperial couple and their guests of honour, including Bertie and his sister, are sitting at a long table up in the royal box. Below them, filling the stalls area, are 400 diners, who are not simply sitting down to eat – half of them are on their feet, wandering from table to table, saying bonsoir to friends, showing off their new outfits. And watching all this from around the stalls and up in the circle seats is an audience of less honoured guests, who have been invited to dance but not to dine. They are leaning over the parapets, pointing out celebrities, taking in the glittering scene.
Bertie had almost certainly never seen anything like it in his life, and the same might well have been true for Victoria, who wrote in her diary that it was ‘quite one of the finest and most magnificent sights we have ever witnessed’.
After dinner, there were fireworks, including a pyrotechnic tableau of Windsor Castle, then more dancing, which went on until three, although according to her diary, Victoria and her family left at two, ‘the children in ecstasies’.
It is very easy to understand Bertie’s ecstasy. Napoléon III hadn’t assembled a royal court in the staid English sense of the word – he was living in a French carnival, an imperial-themed holiday camp. Bertie must have understood by now that there was much more to being a sovereign than waving to one’s subjects and learning German grammar. You were also entitled to enjoy yourself, and if you had enough servants, money, palaces and beautiful people at your disposal, the enjoyment was extreme.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that next morning, the last of their visit, Bertie and Vicky went to beg Eugénie to persuade their parents to let them stay on. When Eugénie diplomatically replied that Victoria and Albert couldn’t do without them, Bertie is said to have retorted: ‘Not do without us! Don’t imagine that. They don’t want us and there are six more of us at home.’
As the royal party, accompanied by Napoléon, left from the Gare de Strasbourg later that day, one observer, the Comtesse d’Armaillé, wrote that Bertie ‘kept looking around him, as though desperate to miss nothing of these last moments in Paris’.
After yet another review of the troops at Boulogne that Victoria described as a ‘forest of bayonets’ (perhaps Napoléon was giving her awaiting Royal Navy officers a subtle reminder that his coast was well defended), there was a final dinner, followed by emotional farewells. The children cried as their boat steamed away from France, and for much
the same reasons as the teenage Mary Queen of Scots (who was half French14) had done almost 300 years earlier when she was banished from her cosy life at the French court to go rule over unruly Scotland.
Bertie may have been in shock that his French holiday was suddenly over, but he must also have felt the first stirrings of a conviction that he had to return to France at all costs, and that he would one day resume the fun where he had left off. Like some Dickensian waif who gets his first taste of cake, he had become aware that there was a better life out there somewhere. And thanks to Napoléon and Eugénie, Bertie knew that France was a place where he would be welcomed with open arms.
‘Open arms’ being the apt expression. Because it wasn’t only the grand ceremonies that had made their mark on him. More important than all that, surely, was the huge dose of self-esteem that he had just received. After years of a stifled existence peopled almost exclusively by dry tutors and disapproving parents, of an education that consisted of being reminded at every opportunity that he was a waste of ink, in France he had been a success. People liked him, they wanted to paint him, they actually admired him. He had not only behaved regally in public, earning even his mother’s approval and banishing all memories of his tantrums at home, he had danced well, made conversation with an emperor, an empress and their courtiers, and achieved something that he had never even come close to back in England – he had fitted in. He had been good company. He had been one of the gang.
What was more, no one in Paris looked askance at him for his German accent. All his life he would mispronounce the English letter R as a Teutonic clearing of the throat, but this only helped him speak better French.
He had also been treated like a valued adult friend rather than an imperfect heir. Napoléon had taken Bertie out for a personal guided tour of his capital, driving the small carriage himself. Afterwards, the two of them strolled on the terraces of the Palais des Tuileries,15 chatting man to man. Like everything else during the Paris trip, this was a very new experience for Bertie – the worldly Frenchman taking time to show him around, talking to him about something other than schoolwork or the need to be less insane than Mother’s ancestors.